When adding a new product that I wanted to show at the top of a category the other day I had to click the little up arrow about 50 times to get it where I wanted it using manual placement.

Using AJAX to drag and drop these things right where you want them would be a great feature IMHO.



I'm using BV5 SP2, so maybe this has been addressed already.





UPDATE:

Here's and example of what I mean:

http://tool-man.org/examples/sorting.html

In my opinion it should be put in right along with kitting.

Maybe I misread your original post. Reads that you would prefer sorting over kitting.

I presented this type of category sorting to BV probably more than a year ago when 5 was in beginning stages. There are apps out already utilizing the feature and frankly, after building 2 BV5 stores of substantial size and 4 more in the works of equal or greater size, the current setup is time consuming, slow and prohibitive to realistic deadlines.




Sorry BV!!! I think you spoiled me with BV2004. There is a difference between the performance of both apps. Apples to Oranges I'm sure.

Matt, I have little use for kitting. I'd trade that for easier sorting (all over the admin quite frankly) plus 3 or 4 'pebble in the shoe' things also at the top of my list.

Some major improvements I'll gladly pay for either in a BVC 5 and a half release (non-hotfix), or BVC 6. I signed up for BV4 in March '06 and was told to wait for BV5... In many ways, I'm still waiting. Some things are much better for the merchant in the control and look of the front end (customer-side) than where I came from. Some admin functions are there, just 'dated' in function and usability.

So much of what we see on the screen takes up way too much real estate and many pages culd be condensed into one or two. Five tabs on the order info page for instance. We can condense the screen and easily show everything at once. Admins lacking permission to see cc info would see ****. Etc.

Way too many controls are scattered around the admin. It's cluttered and confusing and tough to learn your way around. Even though everything works, you can tell that the designer doesn't use the software to set-up and run a store.

The drag and drop feature in admin would be awesome..

I agree with Rudy. Drag and Drop would be awesome. I put in a request (a year ago) for some admin user defined sort options for that exact problem. I think they were added but I don't know how to use them for our purposes.

Our problem with clicking the buttons is we display the product in several different categories. Every time I add a product it goes in on the bottom and I have to click buttons in 3 or more categories. If I remove one, then subsequently add it back, I have to start over again. And we don't have that many products. It's got to be a real pita for those of you with decent sized catalogs.

Bob Noble

I do still like the software though.

A major overhaul to the administration side is planned for BV Commerce 6. Yes, we do in fact use our own software at bvsoftware.com/store and are aware that some things could be better. I personally, was never happy with the way category and product sorting ended up in BV Commerce 5. I feel your pain in some areas of the software but I firmly believe that BV Commerce stands up extremely well to our similarly priced competitors at the moment. There are some great new innovations that we're watching closely in other web based software and experience over features will drive BV Commerce 6.

Kitting is scheduled for service pack 4 for BV Commerce 5 by the end of march. Our current development has most everything working from the admin and store side with a few select options being completed for kitting. Service pack 4 will also include an enhanced registry system capable of handling wishlists, baby registries and wedding registries.

We have evaluated switching from Anthem to another AJAX framework for BV Commerce 5. Our most likely candidate (and most requested) is the Microsoft Ajax library. At this time many of the major web hosting companies do not support the framework and that has limited our options for a BV Commerce 5 change up on Ajax.

Marcus,
Can you please explain this "At this time many of the major web hosting companies do not support the framework".
MS Ajax is an extension to your site not to the web server so as long as a hosting company supports ASP.Net 2.0 (which is a minimum to run BVC) they support AJAX 1.0 as well they like it or not.
Adopting MS AJAX would be great. Maybe even implementing something like DevExpress or Infragistics for the grids and controls of the admin side could be considered. These controls are awesome with some great functionality from sorting, filtering, d&d. You would save lots of time and resources by implementing such controls.
Regards,
Corneliu.

Corneliu,

Some of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX features won't work unless the DLL is installed in the GAC due to medium trust on some hosts. This means that until .Net 3.5 is more widely supported we may have to hold off on moving away from Anthem. Also, there is a serious risk of introducing bugs when we switch out javascript libraries and we would prefer to do this in a full version upgrade where we have more time for testing.

I have to agree, I don't really get MS Ajax and really don't like it either, just from my limited experience with the demos and looking at some of the docs. MS can be really sloppy when it comes to web stuff, and MS Ajax is a good example, from my point of view.

It's easy for me to say, as a designer, but I'd abandon WebForms in a heartbeat. If BVC6 went .Net MVC I'd be pretty happy, if just because I understand it better through my Rails work.

I have a difficult time working with/around Anthem, probably because I don't completely understand how to customize it in separate scripts. I'd love to fully take advantage of any of my favorite js libraries - like MooTools, jQuery, or even Yahoo's - without so much interference. It's all just so messy and heavy right now.